Desert was a breeze- gotta love Aqua Breath.
Ruins weren't too bad, had to do a bit of grinding to get 1000 Needles and L4 Graviga. Getting White Wind, of course, was easy cheese.
Archaeoavis was great. 1000 Needles spam and then finished it off with L5 Death.

time for some badass music and then my final roll! It's... Dan-awwwwwww.

^Good luck! Dancer has been interesting to play with. If you like to go fishing for a 1/4 chance, it's a grand ole time.

So after some good ol' fashioned grinding in the Bal Castle Basement, it was time to head to Castle Exdeath for probably my hardest challenge so far.

This fight was not easy. It took me 4 tries to get it done. Whenever Exdeath gets under 50% health, he starts Dual-casting. If I got the wrong combination of spells back-to-back, I was just sunk. I was also fighting tooth and nail to keep my party buffs up, which Exdeath had fun casting Dispel to get rid of. My strategy eventually boiled down to Bartz rolling dice with Dance, Krile attacking when in front row or casting Fira when forced into the back row by Reverse Polarity, Faris running clean-up on Shell/Protect, and Lenna basically casting Curaga every turn. It was really tough, but, hey.

I made it work.

Favorite line in the game, I think.

Antlion was fine. I didn't get any pictures of Gargoyles, but that was actually extremely difficult to me. I couldn't figure out how to keep them from casting Transfusion and just both respawning with 5,000 HP. I don't have any reliable damage dealing that can even crack 500, so it was really tough to whittle one down to under 500, then do the same to the other, and kill them quick enough before they resurrect. One Transfusion and I basically had to reset, because I had wasted so much MP to get that far. Spamming Romeo's Ballad seemed to help, but even then, the Stop would only last for under a round, so I had to work fast.

Been fumbling around in the desert pyramid for a while. Hoping to crank some out this weekend.

Ugh. What the hell? Liquid Flame is suddenly a bitch to fight with all Mystic Knights. I keep missing virtually every attack. I don't get it. In my first play-through I just used ice magic and it died fairly quickly. I use Spellblade Blizzara but I keep missing. I land a hit maybe once every 15 strikes.

NSFW
I kinda forgot that this boss was here, so I forgot to save after completing the pyramid. Thankfully, I was able to do it first try, because I did not want to have to go back into that freaking Pyramid again. Losing one party member is seriously detrimental to my strategy; only having 3 throughout that dungeon was way more challenging than I expected it to be.

This boss was annoying because I couldn't deal too much damage to him at a time. So not only was I playing roulette, but I was doing it 300-400 damage at a time. Thankfully, because the battle was so long, I think I must have been Level 70 or so by the end of it, because I have Hero's Rime playing basically the whole time. And, bonus--Wendigo's normal attacks don't count as Physical! So once Faris was singing away, she was locked in for the entire battle. That helped a whole lot.

So about this point in the game, I remembered that Rods were a thing. You can't buy them anywhere in the second world, so I had run out--but now that Karnak is back, I was able to go really load up. And, guess what? Even though Minotaur bans the use of Magic, you can still break Rods on him. Bartz took the healing role in this battle.

Fam. Lenna is officially beastly. Holy Dualcast is just monstrous.

Omniscient was a lot less of a problem than I anticipated. I took M_K's advice and abused Reflect, Mana's Paean, and Hero's Rime. Again, Omni didn't have any physical attacks, so the bard songs were able to just rack up massive buffs for me.

The most clutch part of this fight was that my Reflect was still up when Omni went ham at the end of the fight. If that weren't the case, not even Shelled Lenna could have survived that Flaire. But thankfully, he just Flared himself to death. Nice.

I have all the legendary weapons that my party can equip, and I have all the highest-powered magic that my party can take advantage of. Next order of business is grinding for the final run. Wish me luck.

I really had to level grind. My party was in the low 30s when I beat Necrophobe, but now they've beefed up a bit and I'm ready to take on Exdeath.

The first form wasn't too hard, although White Hole was annoying since it kills and petrifies a party member. Lenna and Faris focused on healing and buffing while Butz and Krile chugged Giant, Speed and Hero Potions and hit Exdeath with everything they had.

Here's where things got difficult. Almagest was really rough due to the immense damage it dealt, but most of the time my party was able to tank it. Dispel was annoying because it would remove all of the buffs I had set up for a character, and I'd have to hurry to replace them in time to prevent that party member from being wiped out. Grand Cross was usually manageable thanks to Lenna's Recover, but occasionally resulted in nasty situations like...

...this. Talk about back from the brink. I'm still not sure how I managed to survive this one.

Things got easier once two of the four parts were killed. At that point I tried damaging the two remaining parts evenly so I wouldn't have to deal with the Meteor spam at the end.

And that's that! What a great game. This challenge has reminded me why I love it so much.

Overall I'm pretty happy with my roll. White Mage was a little rough at the beginning of the game when it was all I had, but afterward it was invaluable. Mystic Knight was also pretty great to have, especially once I started getting the high-level spells. Once I got Flare I was doing tons of damage. Beastmaster was probably my least useful class. Certain enemies had useful abilities, but they were limited to one use and I didn't have the patience to farm enemies to capture. Chemist came in handy, especially since it allowed my damage dealers to boost their stats with potions. Recover was also a really good ability for quickly and efficiently removing status effects.

Marilink, post: 1641275, member: 23215 wrote:Congrats, Val! Just out of curiosity, what level were you in the end? And I can't believe you made it back from that 2 dead, 1 Zombie situation. That's nuts.

...and when did you make your name in the Summary link to Caramelldansen? I missed that right up until now...

Valigarmander wrote::whistle:

I ground a good ten levels or so at the end, so I think my party was all around level 42.